Monthly Archives: November 2020

Signs of the Great Depression

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Most of us can’t really “get” the Great Depression – and that’s good! Unless we’ve been in a poverty-stricken foreign country, we can only dimly imagine what it’s like to have much of the economy crashing down with no social safety net. No Social Security. No unemployment compensation. Very few unions. No pension plans. A low level of home ownership (only 40% of homes were owner-occupied).
Even if you had put money away for a rainy day, your bank(s) might pull the rug out from under you. J. B. Sturdevant Bank of Avoca failed in 1929, and the following year Mr. Sturdevant paid depositors 10 cents on every dollar they’d entrusted him with. Savona National Bank closed in late April, 1931, and Painted Post National Bank in December.
Hornell had three banks as 1932 dawned, but First National went down on Valentine’s Day. Just over two months later, perhaps unnerved by First National’s fate, depositors started a run on the remaining banks. Steuben Trust survived, and indeed just merged with Community in 2020. But Citizens National, which went back over 80 years, was broken on April 30.
Atlanta National Bank failed in April, 1933, but reorganized and reopened a few weeks later; depositors got 85 cents on the dollar, though shareholders lost everything.
And as we think about all that annihilated money, remember that it wasn’t just families and individuals – businesses, churches, and municipalities lost their money too. So did insurance companies and pension plans, so if you were counting on THEM, you might well be out of luck.
The Great Depression devastated much of the world, at levels high and low, and had ongoing effects that were often hard to spot. In World War II, with the military voraciously frantic for personnel, almost a fourth of recruits or inductees washed out medically — they had grown up with proper food, medical care, or dental care. Poverty is bad for national security.
What was going on locally in 1929-1941?
*By 1932, Corning Glass Works revenue had fallen 50% from 1929, and employment by a third (about 900 people). Those who still had jobs got 10% pay cuts.
*Corning City employees got a 10% pay cut, plus layoffs. The city exhausted its entire 1931 “relief” budget before August. Annual revenue for St. Mary’s church fell from $25,000 in 1929 to $17,000 in 1935.
*Mercury Aircraft in Hammondsport was down to one employee.
*Bath teachers were “asked” to kick back part of their salaries. “Suggested” percentages were “recommended” with a sliding scale based on salary.
*In 1934, transient bureaus (essentially for homeless) served 1280 people in Bath and 1548 in Hornell, besides 268 residing at a transient camp in Stony Brook Park. (We don’t have numbers for the Corning office.)
*Local government starved as real estate values collapsed. Cohocton town workers got a 10% pay cut. Avoca town roads put men on three-day work weeks. One Avoca man, an immigrant who by hard work had done very well in his new home, hanged himself when it all came crashing down.
*Potatoes got 15 cents a bushel in early 1933, half the cost of producing them. Almost a hundred parcels of land were sold for taxes in Cohocton, and Cohocton teachers got a 10% pay cut. Near Kanona and Harrisburg Hollow, many owners walked away and abandoned their farms.
*An old man once told me of driving with his father from Elmira to Rochester during the Great Depression. In Watkins Glen, Geneva, and every other town along the way, a line of men stretched way down the sidewalk, slowly shuffling forward to get a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
There ARE those who downplay the Depression, and insist that it wasn’t actually all that bad. They are wrong. And they insult those who suffered through it.

“From the Bed to the Wall:” Quilts at the Rockwell

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Rockwell Museum currently has a special exhibit, “From the Bed to the Wall: Quilts from a Private New York Collection.”

Quilts are… what? Prosaic utilitarian objects… interesting folk craft artifacts… revelatory data of history, society, culture, and ethnicity… creations of high art.

The answer is, any of the above… and sometimes more than one at once.

Curiously, it seems that from the 1700s to today, quilts have made a journey from high craft, to common furnishing, to high art.

When cloth was an expensive, hand-made material, quilters were upper-class women, well-skilled in decorative arts. The new “dark, satanic mills” of the industrial revolution flooded the world with millions of acres of cloth, for which price suddenly became almost inconsequential.

Now ordinary women… and it was overwhelmingly women… became quilters. Design and technique became folkways. Since it was women’s work, and since the end result was a domestic product, and since hardly anybody paid money for it, scholarly and cultural types paid it no attention at all.

The exhibition in Rockwell’s mezzanine carries us from the end of the 18th century to the dawn of the 21st. Technique is not much touched upon. Part of the emphasis is on design, and part is on the cultural or personal settings of the creators.

“Crows Quilt,” a creation by African American artist Sarah May Taylor (1916-2000) was one of my favorites. Three crows adorn each block, but no two blocks are alike, each varying the color and position of the birds.

My other favorite was “Center Diamond,” made about 1910 by a Pennsylvania Amishwoman. The geometric design fits with traditional Amish wariness about figural art, but it also makes a bold, dramatic assertion that seizes your attention from across the room. It opens the “Amish and Modernism” section of the exhibit, an apt if counterintuitive observation – Amish design… so conservative and traditional… anticipates, and even guides, modern design.

Joyce’s favorite was a highly personal sampler quilt, where many blocks include prayers or meditations, almost as though the whole thing forms a personal or religious journal.

We examined an 1891 redwork pattern quilt, trying in vain to discern whether the artist embroidered her figures freehand, or whether she stitched over a printed pattern. (If she did it freehand, she was DARN good.) We also looked closely at a midwestern Amish Bow Tie quilt (c. 1920), finished with several eye-catching errors – such as one block incomplete, one block rotated 90 degrees, and one block off-color. It’s been a traditional practice in some Amish circles to deliberately make a quilt with visible errors, to emphasize that only God achieves perfection.

There were a couple of doll quilts and a couple of crazy quilts, plus a few “friendship” or “signature” quilts, on which the names of makers, friends, or supporters are embroidered. This included a “tithing quilt” from Brewerton Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1924). The term was utterly new to us, despite a couple of decades of living in southeastern Pennsylvania… it seems it’s a signature quilt, but what it has to do with tithing is beyond us!

(The quilt exhibit runs through January 10. Also on just now are are “Antigravity: Elaine K. Ng,” through February 2022; “Three Generations: Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Margrete Bagshaw,” through January; the Gingerbread Invitational, through December 31; and “Martine Gutierrez: Takeover,” through December 13.)


My Heart’s in the Highland (Park)

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If you’ve been to the Lilac Festival, you’ve been to Rochester’s Highand Park.

And if you’ve been there, you’ve noticed that it brings a swath of nature right into the center of a great city – easy to drive to, easy to walk to, easy to take the bus or the bike to.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century landscaping guru, created the space, just as he created Rochester’s Seneca Park, and Manhattan’s Central Park. Streets and trails in Highland wend and wander. The ground heaves up and drops down. Practically every step creates a new space, a new vista, a new delight.

In the days of flu and COVID, Highland is a fine spot for the kids to run around, or for the old folks to ramble.

Highland Park is forested, but it’s not the forest that our forebears cut down. It’s a curated forest, an arboretum, designed in part to delight the visitor.

Mission accomplished.

Highland started out on 20 acres donated in 1888 by Ellwanger and Barry, tree nursery entrepreneurs, and is now up to 150 acres, operated by Monroe County Parks. John Dunbar (“Johnny Lilacseed”) started the lilac collection in 1892.

Highland Park is famed for its statue of Frederick Douglass, who made his home (and an underground railroad station) nearby. With its many hidden folds, the park has become the site of numerous other monuments and memorials. On a recent 90-minute visit, I stumbled across two monuments that were new to me.

One was a small stone at the base of a very large tree, honoring members of the National Women’s Service Corps. Our older son told me that this was a female companion to the Civilian Conservation Corps, or C.C.C., during the New Deal. (The women’s installations got to be called She-She-She camps.)

A little later on my ramble I thought, “Ah! THIS is where the Rochester Vietnam Memorial is.” Flowing easily along the lay of the land, the centerpiece of the Memorial is a paved patio, with the national flag, the M.I.A./P.O.W. flag, and the flags of each service. A winding Walk of Honor is lined with 280 uprights, each bearing the name of a Rochester-area person killed in the conflict.

Some parts of the park, like the Sunken Garden and the Warner Castle, I’ve never explored. But I HAVE repeatedly spent pleasurable hours in the 1911 Lamberton Conservatory – definitely a shelter in the time of storm, for I’ve enjoyed its semi-tropical warmth even as the snow and sleet beat down upon the windows. I also like spotting other turn-of-the-century architecture, in bricks rather than glass, for some of the park’s installations.

In addition to the Greater Rochester Vietnam Memorial, Highland Park is home to the AIDS Memorial; the Victims Rights Memorial; and the Workers Rights Memorial. It also has sledding, ice skating, geo-caching, concerts, athletic fields, and Shakespeare in the Park. Highland fits every mood, and every season. And admission is free.

A Walk Through History in Mount Hope Cemetery

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If you’re in Rochester, and you want someplace interesting and inexpensive in which to walk about and recreate yourself, you might try Mount Hope Cemetery. A lot of people might be baffled by the thought. If so, they don’t know Mount Hope.

It started out small, as these things do, and it started out early. (Nathanael Hawthorne wrote that whenever you have a new community, no matter how idealistic, the first things you build are a jail and graveyard.) As usual they relegated the cemetery to the least useful ground – the ground they could grudgingly spare from food production. It was hilly, rocky and confusing (people got lost), with pockets of mist, and a reputation for haunting that went back to the Iroquois days.

In the mid-19th century views of death started to change. Queen Victoria, losing her husband young, set off on a decades-long career of Mourning, and just as today, the British royals set the mode. Death and burial became a little less homespun, both now involving dedicated spaces and dedicated professionals. The Civil War brought forth hundreds of thousands of new mourners. People didn’t want graveyards and more. They wanted cemeteries.

Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, godfather of a new field of endeavor – landscape engineering. He created Central Park in Manhattan, and Highland Park and Seneca Park in Rochester, plus the original Cornell campus. Meticulously manicured spaces didn’t look natural – they looked BETTER than nature. Olmsted created dramatic folds and dells and hills and dingles, diverted streams and gave them rocks to play with, planted forests. City folks could feel that they were getting a day in the country, but without the long trip, the manure, the brambles, and the resentful rustics.

Mount Hope became one of many cemeteries that took a leaf from Olmsted’s book. It became something new – a “rural cemetery,” off (at that time) on the edge of the city, and landscaped to be something of a park.

The city has caught up with the “rural” cemetery, but Mount Hope still covers 200 green-clad acres with 350,000 interments, and 500 to 800 more each year. It’s the final resting place for Nathanael Rochester – Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony – newspaper tycoon Frank Gannett, who got his start in Elmira – Seth Green, “the father of fish culture” – Mr. Bausch, AND Mr. Lomb.

(Some are worried that Miss Anthony’s gravestone is being loved to death, covered all over each election year with “I Voted” stickers.)

One section near Strong Hospital includes a TALL 19th-century firemen’s monument, and a burying ground specifically for fire fighters. (It also includes a memorial to the old-time horses.) Nearby is a monument to Boyd and Parker, who were killed near Cuylerville in Sullivan’s invasion during the Revolution, and a mass grave of unknowns, relocated from the neighborhood of the early poorhouse, prison, and insane asylum.

One very moving space is dedicated entirely to veterans of the Civil War. This includes the massive 1908 sculpture of a soldier and a drummer boy, “Defenders of the Flag.”

A stroll through the stones is a hike through Rochester history, with every ethnic group, every religion, every occupation represented. Some stones are in Hebrew, some in Cyrillic script. No doubt if I explored further, I’d find inscriptions in Arabic and in far eastern scripts. It’s inspiring. It does a heart good.

A Trip to the Seneca Park Zoo

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Well, there I was, sort of stranded in Rochester. I’d dropped my wife off at Strong Hospital for surgery, but what with coronavirus and all, they won’t let you in until she’s back in a regular ward, which in this case meant about eight hours. So since movies, museums, and malls were pretty much out, considering my goal of avoiding the virus as much as possible, I needed something else to do. So I went to the zoo.

Think about it. It’s outdoors, it’s interesting, and it’s easy to maintain your social distance. You can whip right through if you like, or idle along if you prefer. Perfect destination for times like these.

You can learn a lot at the zoo. I learned that I am only of passing interest to snow leopards, and a subject of wary watchfulness for gray wolves. Red pandas, on the other hand, think I’m fascinating.

Nowadays, as with most places, admissions are capped to maintain proper distancing. So it’s smart to call ahead and book your arrival time, but I had no trouble arriving around 10:30 on a Thursday and buying a ticket at the gate.

Seneca Park Zoo, like many another, is constantly rebuilding and reinventing itself. That can be a little annoying in some ways, but I like to see thinking and improvement going on. Right inside the entrance a new Tropic Adventure Zone is under construction, soon to form a habitat for animals from the Congo, Borneo, and Madagascar – all creatures that don’t suit our climate at all, and so need highly-specialized habitat. (Old-timers may miss the 1931 Main Building, but better lives for the animals has to be the goal.)

The Cold Asia Zone is already in place, for animals that enjoy a climate roughly similar to ours. It was here that I met the pair of snow leopards, pacing their rough habitat just as they would in the mountains of central Asia.

Right next to them were the red pandas, who at least at the time of my visit were far more active, even a little hyper-active. (The zoo web site says that red pandas spend 13 hours a day foraging.) They were each constantly tracing his or her preferred route through their habitat, including climbing uprights and walking branches. Each time they passed me, though, they stopped to visit for a minute or so, peering through the glass at the strange visitor from another planet. The pandas and the leopards are both endangered species.

The Rocky Coasts area is home to penguins (African black-footed), sea lions (California), and polar bears. ALL of them like the water immensely. I was reading some label copy stating that the polar bear likes hanging out by the window lookout, and was wondering just what location they meant, when I looked down and saw her pacing back and forth almost under my feet. You’d think it would be hard to miss a polar bear, but I almost managed it.

Giraffes and zebras are sharing the African savanna habitat, just as they do in the wild. Zebra feeding stations are, unsurprisingly, at ground level – zebras are grazing animals, after all. But giraffes are browsers, and THEIR feeding stations are on the second floor of an adjoining building – which makes perfect sense, but still looks like something out of a cartoon.

Of course I stopped in to see the river otters, they being some of my very favorite animals… I love to see them sport and play. The otter would swim to one end of his tank, then flip onto his back and zip over to the starting point – every time. And the sea lions were doing the same. Perhaps it’s a Rochester custom.

Anyhow, if you’re looking for something outdoors to do – try the zoo! And there are also zoos in Buffalo (Buffalo Zoo), Syracuse (Rosamund Gifford), and Binghamton (Ross Park). I’ve been to them all.